Also today, tens of thousands of Bitcoin millionaires have vanished over the past three months.
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Editor's Note: Do You Own Grimacecoin?
It's dangerous to joke in the crypto space.
This week, everyone's favorite dog-coin lover Elon Musk tweeted that he would eat a McDonald's Happy Meal on TV if the fast food chain began accepting Dogecoin.
First off, who really needs to see Elon Musk eating a burger on TV?
But moving on — McDonald's had a response ready, and it was almost as nonsensical as Musk's proposal. McD's would accept DOGE when Tesla began accepting Grimacecoin.
What is Grimacecoin, you may ask? Well, Grimace is "a rotund, purple being of indeterminate species with short arms and legs" in the McDonald's universe.
We all know that this isn't a real coin, and Tesla couldn't possibly accept it as a payment… except that after McDonald's tweeted, more than a dozen Grimacecoins popped up for sale (with Grimace/WBNB on PancakeSwap up 120,000%.)
Financial site Benzinga even published an entire guide into buying GRIMACE, with sections such as: "Is GRIMACE a good investment?"
No, GRIMACE is not a good investment. It. Is. Not. Real.
But McDonald's made it real! And this is not the first time that a big company making a joke about a fake coin led to real people trading it — remember CoinMarketCap's (amazing) 2020 April Fool's joke, when we listed Toilet Paper Token (TPT) as #0 on our homepage? TPTs began trading everywhere!
The lessons to be learned from this are both specific and broad.
1. If you are a company and you tweet about a fake coin, expect it to be traded on a DEX within the hour.
2. If you are a memecoin degen trader, beware of fake memecoins that will pump and dump faster than Elon Musk can think up his next tweet.
Bitcoin falls after Fed announcement 📉
Bitcoin has fallen after the Federal Reserve confirmed that interest rates are likely to increase in March. The central bank's chairman Jerome Powell has suggested a lot of uncertainty remains — especially when it comes to how many rate hikes there will be in 2022. All of this comes as the Fed tries to bring spiraling inflation under control. BTC is currently trading at $36,821 — down 3.76% on the day and markedly lower than the highs of $38,825 seen before Powell's news conference.
30,000 BTC millionaires have vanished 🤯
Bitcoin's dramatic crash over the past few months means tens of thousands of investors are no longer millionaires. Back on Nov. 12 — not long after BTC hit a new all-time high of $68,789 — a grand total of 108,886 addresses had a balance that was greater than $1 million. But fast forward to the present day, with prices currently around $36,500, and data from BitInfoCharts reveals that the number of millionaires has dwindled to just 80,409. Far fewer addresses have a balance above $10 million too.
Melania Trump's NFT sale ends in tears 😭
Melania Trump's NFT collection hasn't performed anywhere near as well as she hoped. The former first lady was auctioning off three items, including a hat she wore to France. Opening bids for "The Head of State Collection" were set at the equivalent of $250,000 in SOL. Unfortunately for Melania, just five offers above the starting price were made — and a sharp fall in the value of SOL means she will only receive $163,800 at current prices. So… is she going to sell up or HODL?
Crypto can make you attractive, poll suggests 😍
If a new survey is to be believed, there's hope for single sats stackers who are hoping to find love this Valentine's Day. According to eToro, 33% of Americans would actually be more likely to go on a date with someone who mentions cryptocurrencies in their dating profile. And bizarrely, 74% of those polled said they would be interested in going on a second date with someone who paid the bill in Bitcoin. If you're not single, the survey also suggests buying your significant other an NFT is not a good idea.
Crypto laundering surged by 30% in 2021 🚨
Cybercriminals laundered cryptocurrency worth $8.6 billion in 2021, according to new figures from Chainalysis. The blockchain intelligence firm's data shows this is a 30% rise compared with the year before, but markedly below the all-time high of $10.9 billion that was recorded in 2019. By comparison, estimates from the UN Office of Drugs and Crime suggest anywhere between $800 billion and $2 trillion in fiat currency is laundered every single year.
MakerDAO's content team fired ❌
MakerDAO is now fully decentralized, meaning it's governed by people who hold MKR tokens. Six months on, and they've now effectively fired the project's content team — with one community member arguing memes have a greater impact. Decrypt has the lowdown on what happened… and the fallout.
